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Oct.16 — The Black Monday crash was 30 years ago this week. “Black Swan” author Nassim Taleb was a trader for First Boston at the time. He made a lot of money while others lost fortunes. He recounts the experience with Bloomberg’s Erik Schatzker.

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Aug.16 — Nassim Nicholas Taleb, adviser at Universa Investments, sat down for an interview with Erik Schatzker Tuesday evening in New York. Taleb, famous for his assessment of risk, says there are greater risks out there than nuclear war with North Korea.

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In this video, Nassim provides a general presentation of his research, in which he debunks Pinker’s faulty statistics in his book on violence (The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined).

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We use fragility theory to show the effect of size and response to uncertainty, how distributed decision-making creates more apparent volatility, but ensures long term survival of a system. Simply, economies of scale are more than offset by stochastic diseconomies from shocks and there is such a thing as a “sweet spot” in optimal size. We show how city-states fare better than large states, how mice and small species are more robust than elephants, and how the canton mechanism can potentially solve Near Eastern problems.

This talk was part of “Cities and Development: Urban Determinants of Success” — the NYU Development Research Institute’s 2014 Conference, hosted jointly with the Marron Institute of Urban Management. The conference touched on the role of cities in the development process.

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On GMOs: “A pound of algebra is worth a ton of verbal commentary”. I managed to fit the Precautionary Principle into a few lines. The GMO paid propagandists are pounding tons of verbalistic statements (even an incompetent smear campaign), but this simple summary should cancel about everything they are trying to say. In a single column. They need to refute my representation or show that f(breeding) has the same maximum as f(GMOs).

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Nassim recently got into a battle on Twitter with Josh Barro, a journalist for The New York Times, after Barro took aim at people who “think GMOs are bad.” Business Insider has screenshots of the action.

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On his Facebook page, Nassim gives us the heads-up about a public lecture called Antifragility: Gaining From Volatility, Stress, and Disorder that he will be giving in Singapore on Wednesday, September 24th at the National Library. It’s free but you need to register on the library’s website to reserve your seat.